A U.C. Riverside environmentalist is sounding the alarm about your commute. 

Professor David Volz and colleagues hand-picked 90 commuter students who were given silicone wristbands to wear for five days. The goal was to find organophosphate esters on the wristbands, because some papers link those to harm in zebrafish and some epidemiologists will link anything to anything in humans.  They found one, TDCIPP - chlorinated tris - at higher levels and speculate that it is oozing out of car seat foam and into our bodies.

Just correlation, no testing

I got an email from an analytics group pitching an article about Valentine's Day movie results. 

It promised:

"If you’re planning to celebrate Valentine’s Day by watching a romantic film you’ll probably end up watching Isn’t It Romantic, according to the latest" blah blah blah (which) "analyzed Google Trends data of IMDBs list of ‘100 romantic films for Valentine's Day’ to reveal which films were the most popular in February 2019.

A new paper by epidemiologists in Europe will overturn centuries of diet and health thinking; the thinking that eating too much makes people gain weight.

Instead, the new statistical correlation argues, the weight gain is due to pregnant women who used cosmetics containing parabens, which triggered epigenetic changes in the babies, who then grew up to be fat. It is yet another thing you can blame on your mother.

When it comes to the political divide in America, the key difference in science is that academia has mostly Democrats while private sector scientists are mostly Republicans. There are big tents in a two-party system so a liberal New York cop will have nothing in common with a San Francisco progressive but they will both vote Democrat and this big tent philosophy covers science as well. Republicans are considered deniers of climate change and evolution while Democrats deny vaccines and agriculture, and the rest of the tent has to endure them.

Environmental Working Group, a litigation group devoted to food and chemical issues, is most famous for publishing its annual "Dirty Dozen" list to promote publicly available pesticide residues on food. While neglecting to mention that their organic industry clients are not tested separately.

In the early days of the environmental war on agriculture, activists claimed they were not against the science itself, they were anti-corporate. They didn't want a company in charge of the food supply.

The argument resonated with a lot of people, including university scholars, so when the opportunity to solve the vitamin A deficiency issue in the developing world became available with genetic engineering, it was an independent group of scholars that developed a GMO rice with higher levels of beta-carotene. They made this Golden Rice available for free.